Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water, it starts to look as though someone in the Bible thinks that there are only two kinds of people in the world. We hear it is in the first Psalm today, which compares two kinds of people: there are those “who have not walked in the way of the wicked,” who are “like trees planted by streams of water; and then there are “the wicked,” who are “like chaff which the wind blows away.” Two kinds of people.
Jesus gives us a hint of it in the passage from Matthew’s gospel where he says that “prophets are not without honor except in their own country.” St. Matthew explains that there are places where people believe, and places where the people’s unbelief prevents Jesus from accomplishing anything much. Two kinds of places; two kinds of people.
But it is in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles where we encounter what is actually the tail end of the account of what had been a major concern and preoccupation of the early church, namely, whether there might only be two kinds of people in the world: people who keep the Jewish law and people who don’t keep the Jewish law. Two kinds of people.
And since Jesus was a Jew who taught and ministered amongst his own people in their own lands, the question was pressing: do those who want to follow Jesus have to follow the Jewish law - especially men, who would then be required to be circumcised? It was a sensitive subject.
So, you see, it is not simply a homiletic trope of mine; it is actually a matter that has been a carefully considered question in the church’s early history: are there only two kinds of people in the world? Ever since I got on this trope, over the summer (since it does seem to be an implied assumption throughout so many scriptural texts), the world around me has tended to lean in to the possibility that there really are only two kinds of people in it: left and right, good and bad, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, with me or against me, Jew and Gentile, orthodox and devil-may-care. The list could go on.
In Jerusalem, the question had been brewing for a little while, since, for Jews, the law (Torah) is everything, or nearly everything. Both Peter and Paul, two out of three of the principal leaders of the early church, seem to have concluded fairly early on that they did not think it was necessary for Gentile men to be circumcised in order to become followers of the way. This was a bold position to take, since circumcision was the sign of the covenant, and the covenant between God and God’s people was what the Torah was all about. And not everyone was so easily convinced that circumcision should not be required for those who followed the teachings of a man who’d been called “rabbi,” after all. What would it mean if God’s people abandoned this sign of the covenant? Wouldn’t it mean that they were also abandoning the covenant, if they were abandoning the sign of the covenant? Wouldn’t it mean they were abandoning God?
St. Paul never wavered in his conviction about this matter. He himself, suspected that St. Peter had his doubts. There was much anxiety about the question among the first Christian Jews, who couldn’t say for sure that they were one or the other; couldn’t claim with conviction to be one or another of two kinds of people in the world.
This kind of religious anxiety has not gone away in our own time, though it tends to present itself in much less theologically central matters, like: human sexuality, the filioque clause, law or grace, the inerrancy of scripture, etc., etc. Even these days, we keep finding ways to wonder if maybe there really are only two kinds of people in the world. Of course, the dirty little secret of this life-hermeneutic (this way of seeing the world through a particular lens) is that it is not ever really concerned with two kinds of people. The suggestion that there are only two kinds of people in the world is usually intended to make the point that there ought to be only one kind of person in the world: our kind of person.
Oh, how tempting it must have been for the leaders of the early church to make just that argument: that there was only one kind of person in the world whom God loves, and we know just what such a person looks like. What had been revealed to those first apostles, after all, was that God was establishing a new covenant of love through the Blood of Christ, shed on the Cross. And if there was a new covenant, maybe that meant there needed to be new dividing lines, new boundaries, to determine who exactly the two kinds of people in the world were… so you could also know what the one, right kind of person was?
But in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, St. James of Jerusalem - who is sometimes called St. James the Just, or St. James the brother of Jesus, and who may or may not be the same person as St. James the Apostle, and who assuredly is not the same person as St. James the Less, and who was the third of the three principal leaders of the early church - in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, it is reported that St. James of Jerusalem, in a council gathered for this purpose - to decide if there really only are two kinds of people in the world, and if so, which kind is the one, right kind of person - declared for all the early church to hear that there is not just one kind of person on whom God looks favorably. Quoting the prophet Amos, he reminds his brothers and sisters that God had brought his people back from exile and to return to Jerusalem: “from its ruins I will rebuild it, and I will set it up, so that all other peoples may seek the Lord.”
If you don’t know what’s going on, you almost can’t tell what’s happened in the account we heard from Acts 15 today. If you don’t kind of already know about the controversy, angst, and anxiety that had led to this point, it doesn’t sound momentous when St. James says, “I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God…. “ But what St. James means is that he has decreed that there are not only two kinds of people in the world. Yes, St. James delivered a kind of compromise - that new followers should “abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood.” But in effect, he was declaring that as far as he was concerned there are a whole lot of different kinds of people in the world, and God seemed to look favorably on a bunch of them.
This was the decision of those old-fashioned, out-moded, less-well-educated, and surely less sophisticated Christian men, all those centuries ago: that there’s more than two kinds of people in the world, and that God looks favorably on more of them than we can account for!
I’m not going to belabor the point. But I am going to say what good news this is in a world that sometimes seems eager to assert that there are only two kinds of people in it. There in Jerusalem, the apostles of our faith had to decide if the culture of our faith - which is decidedly monotheistic - should also be monochromatic, mono-cultural, and monolithic. But with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, they discerned that the church should be diverse, inclusive, and multi-cultural, like the world they already lived in.
It may be, as the Psalmist says, that “the Lord knows the way of the righteous; but the way of the wicked is doomed.” It does not go without saying, however, that there are only two kinds of people in the world, and that only one of them is the right kind of people. Such thinking is inauthentic to the church, who has understood from our earliest days that we are being called to believe in one God in the midst of a diverse, inclusive, and multi-cultural world. This recognition is a matter of rejoicing for the church, since it means that the Gospel need not know any bounds; and that the promises of God can actually be shaped (in some measure) to fit the reality of the people to whom those promises are being declared, and that the people don’t need to be shaped (literally or figuratively) to fit the promises of God. Of course, all people of faith need to be formed in our faith. But the fact remains that the church has tended to err when she has insisted too much on shaping the hearers to fit the Gospel, rather than the other way round.
For us, today, we might consider the possibility that whenever we start to insist that there could be only two kinds of people in the world, and especially if we draw the lines along boundaries defined by, say, human sexuality, or the filioque clause, or the choice between law and grace, or the supposed inerrancy of scripture, etc., etc., then we are going down a path that the apostles discerned it was unwise to follow.
We don’t celebrate the life and witness of St. James of Jerusalem, because he was the church’s first DEI officer. But we do celebrate his life and ministry because he was the first to articulate definitively the wisdom that there are not only two kinds of people in the world; and that the church is called to be diverse, inclusive, and multi-cultural, which is the only kind of church that can responsibly and faithfully and lovingly carry the Gospel of Jesus into every corner of the world, so that, in the words of the poet, we can "let all the world in every corner sing, ‘My God and king!’”
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
The Feast of St. James of Jerusalem, 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
a 13th century Italian stone carving of Saints James, Paul, and Peter from the Victoria & Albert Museum